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I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has. If the effort to USGS could be quantified i
by blitmap 6y ago
I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has.
If the effort to USGS could be quantified in a cost, I'd expect Google to pay USGS to make the public data available?
It does sound awful. I don't know what the right answer is.
- xmprt 6y agoCorporations aren't people. I can't get married to Google. If you can point to specific precedence of corporations being given access to certain data on grounds of their personhood then your argument makes sense but just because corporations are considered like people in the context of speech doesn't mean that applies literally everywhere else.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoYou will be able to mary corporations some day: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/us/somerville-polyamorous-domestic-partnership.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/us/somerville-polyamorous...
- JetSpiegel 6y ago> I can't get married to Google. But they can still fuck you over, like when they banned my GMail account for no reason, with no warning nor explanation.
- hanche 6y agoCorporations aren’t people, but from a legal perspective, they have some rights in common with persons, which is why you often hear statements saying they are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
- kerkeslager 6y agoThe law is wrong.
- hanche 6y agoI never said otherwise.
- kerkeslager 6y agoOkay, but it's pretty tiresome to hear the supreme court opinion of corporate personhood brought up constantly as if it has any validity whatsoever.
- hanche 6y agoI can sympathize with that. Unfortunately, the opinion of the supreme court is a force to be reckoned with, whether we agree or not.
- kerkeslager 6y ago> I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has. 1. A corporation is not a person. Corporations don't have rights, except inasmuch as the people within the corporation have rights. 2. The problem isn't that Google has access to the data, it's that USGS and the rest of the world no longer have access to the data, except on Google's terms.
- deelowe 6y agoWasn't there a seminal surpreme court case that has been used as precident to show that corporations do have rights? Something tax related?
- kerkeslager 6y agoThe supreme court also decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves were not included under the constitution and could never be citizens. The supreme court was wrong on racism, and it's wrong on corporate personhood.
- deelowe 6y agoWhat's right and wrong is a purely human construct and changes over time. The point was that, currently, in the eyes of the law, corporations hold many of the same rights as individuals. This could change, but would require special circumstances not considered previously or a change to the law by congress.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]